General Ewing came into the busy life of the world at a time, and under auspices, calculated not only to develop the best that was in him, but to call into active play the strongest elements of his nature. Ohio was in its youthful days; schools and culture had not yet reached that point where a finished education was the rule and expectation of the great mass of the youth as now. The freedom of pioneer life was around him, and while he learned the lessons of refinement and culture within his parental home, he was learning the lessons of self-reliance, courage and personal responsibility, from the outdoor environments of his day and neighborhood. It was, also, a time when the great public questions of the day were debated from the stump, in the home circle, and at the caucus, and not left to the newspapers as at present. The young man was not merely a reader—he was compelled to think, and often talk for himself. He must know something of public life, and he usually had a personal acquaintance with the public men of his day and neighborhood. In the case of General Ewing, one of the chief men of Ohio history was a member of his own household—his father, Thomas Ewing, the Senator from Ohio, and Secretary of the Treasury in the cabinets of the elder Harrison and Tyler, and Secretary of the Interior under Taylor. Thomas Ewing, the son, was born at Lancaster, Ohio, August 7, 1829. Not only was he the natural heir to the qualities that had made his father one of the great statesmen and lawyers of his day, but he could find back among the family names that of Findley Ewing, who distinguished himself under William of Orange, in the famous war of 1688, and was presented with a flag by that monarch, for gallant service at the siege of Londonderry; George Ewing, his grandfather, an ensign and lieutenant of the Revolutionary War; Neil Gillespie—a man of mark, in the early days of the Monongahela, and great-grandfather to James G. Blaine and himself; and his mother’s father, Hugh Boyle, who, in youth was driven from Ireland because of the part he had taken in the Emmet rebellion, and afterward served the State of Ohio for forty years, as clerk of the Supreme Court for Fairfield county. The public life of young Ewing commenced at an early age. When but nineteen, he was appointed secretary of the commission to settle the still vexed question as to whether the boundary between Virginia and Ohio was the high water mark or the low water mark, on the north side of the Ohio River. A year later, he became one of the private secretaries of President Taylor, and after Taylor’s sudden death, entered Brown University at Providence, Rhode Island, from which he was graduated in 1854.